Lanterns for the Dead
by ncfan
Summary: -The Queen, The King- It's little more than a hollow gesture.


**Summary**: It's little more than a hollow gesture.**  
>Author's Note<strong>: As far as astrology goes, I don't really go for that stuff but I thought it would be interesting to make Rapunzel a Leo, since Leo does fall during the summer months and the ruling planet of Leo is, well, _the Sun_.**  
>Disclaimer<strong>: I don't own Tangled.

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><p>Every year it gets harder, and every year the sight of the lantern makes his heart ache and shrivel and die just a little more. <em>So much has been lost, never to return again, <em>she knows he wants to say. _Why can we not simply stop with this tradition and try to move on?_

_Why can we not admit the truth to ourselves? Our daughter is never coming home._

Queen Iseult can see it, her green eyes just as clear-seeing as they have ever been. She can see her husband's despair, feel its tide growing stronger with each passing day, with each passing year that the lanterns are set over a small kingdom and no child answers their call.

An increasingly hollow gesture for them both.

It is nearly time and the heavy velvet gown she dons every year feels even heavier this time around. Iseult sighs within the confines of silence, and looks to her husband.

Lionel looks wan and sick as he does every year on Ariana's birthday. His doubts prey on him and have made him gray where his wife still looks young; _it does not matter that he is so much older than her; he should not look like this, should not look like a man waiting to die. What is it about them, that pain and long years of waiting has sapped the life out of him but has not taken her vitality, her flush of youth from her. She is thirty-nine and he two score and ten, but the gulf seems much wider than that._

Only a fool would think that Iseult doesn't hear her doubts given voice in the long watches of the night when she tries to sleep. _It's been eighteen years—You've had not a single hint of her—So many pretending to be your Ariana; so many deceivers—It's been eighteen years, and the likelihood that she's still alive is slim; there was no ransom demanded, no notice given by a rival kingdom that your daughter was a political hostage—She's likely not alive and even if she is she doesn't remember you; she has no idea who you are._

_Even if she is alive, you mean nothing to her._

That is the worst fear of all, that when she finds her golden daughter again, there will only be a blank there, and someone else will be recognized as "Mother". When Iseult finds Ariana—_if she finds her_—she will be nothing but a high-born, intimidating stranger.

Lionel doesn't even think of that. Iseult knows, even if they don't talk about it. This is the matter of silence; this is the body that lies between them in bed. They don't speak of Ariana, do not suffer another to speak of her in their presence. The name of the missing princess is taboo, all discussion of her not forbidden but not suffered, all the same. And who would speak of a missing child, gossiping in whispers behind hands, in front of their parents, no matter who the child was? This will destroy them both if they don't speak of it, but Iseult doesn't know _how_ to speak to Lionel of Ariana. Not anymore.

Lionel doesn't think of his daughter returning and seeing him only as a stranger. He doesn't think of Ariana returning at all. Instead, he thinks of graves and tiny coffins. He thinks of Death with Its shroud, Death with Its dread scythe and Its great black cloak draped over dry and naked bones. He thinks of gray angels, the hazy psychopomps who come to claim souls after Death claims lives.

He has thought his daughter lost and gone for twelve years now, and that's not likely to change.

And Iseult, as much as she hates to admit it, has started to feel her thoughts slip down the dark road in that direction as well. It's just been _so long_ without a word, without a sign. Surely if Ariana was alive some report of her would have come by now?

But no.

It's nearly time and Iseult reaches forward to smooth down the front of Lionel's doublet. He doesn't say a word and she can hear him aching—like a great, unbending tree starting to waver and splinter under the force of a mighty gale. The hailstones pound on his back and shoulders and the bruises left there never leave.

She's not sure if he was crying before she puts her hands on his cheeks but soon after her hands feel his skin—_worn and tired, even his skin aches with weariness, the aura of a man who moves only because his body tells him to and not because he wants to—_something wet hits it.

Iseult feels her throat knot hard, hot and tight. He has the look of a man utterly defeated, a man who isn't ready to give up but already has. That pain is something all too familiar to them both.

_Everything is dark now, caught in despair, and the lanterns plague my thoughts. Little beacons of light cast for a lost soul who never sees it, never even has the faintest idea that they are being cast for her. She doesn't see it and Corona grows a little darker every year; it can only be dark without the sunbeam, the aurora, the dawn, the golden Princess Ariana._

And it's not Lionel's thoughts anymore, Iseult realizes with a deep cold resting on her bones. These are her own thoughts.

The night of July the twenty-fourth has cooled a little from the blazing day, now comfortable instead of almost unpleasant. It's been an unusually green summer, even for Corona; the perfume of flowers and sweet foods baked in the marketplace is heavy in the air. Even so, there's still a thick humidity in the air but it makes everything seem headier. Tonight is a night for lovers and mourners alike.

As one—_I won't do this alone and neither will you_—they put their fingertips to the elaborate gossamer paper lantern, and let it lift into the air on the slight breeze. There are hundreds, thousands of lantern, plainer, simpler lanterns, soaring, buoyant and aloft, on the breeze, and they bring a light that is almost as the sun—_almost but not quite; nothing will ever be like her Sun_—over the capital of Corona.

There is a difference between the lantern lit and sent flying by the King and Queen from these cruder devices. The lanterns of the common people, both made by hand and sold in the marketplaces, are sent flying by those who still have hope enough to give light to the entire world. Iseult's hope is a cooling ember and Lionel's is gone to ash. Their "hope" could not form a fire to keep a poor child warm for even an hour in winter.

A hollow lantern, a hollow gesture, a lantern that means nothing to Lionel anymore and very little to Lionel.

A beacon for the daughter that was, the daughter that might still be, but likely is not anymore.

This night has become a night of paying tribute to the dead.

_That's how it has always been—those of Corona light lanterns both for a birth and for a death. They are guides to souls both newborn and gone, lights for them to walk beside and be carried into life or that place beyond._

_The lanterns are nothing to Iseult anymore but a mockery of her Sun, her little golden Star._


End file.
